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E-Marketing Performance Blog

Redeeming Customers that Bypassed Your Search Results

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Mike Fleming

First, I’ll state the obvious… You do search engine marketing because 80% of web activity starts with a search. You know the more you can appear in front of your target audience based on the search query they perform, the more customers you will acquire (assuming your company and website do their jobs).

You also know the higher you rank for those search queries, the more you will show up, as searchers typically aren’t patient enough or don’t have the time to deep dive with search engine results. Even if you are the best solution out there, if you don’t show up until page 10, a searcher is more likely to settle for a “good enough” solution to avoid the work of finding the best solution (hopefully that’s you).

Next, I’ll again state the obvious… Even if you rank on the first page of Google, your best efforts will only attract the minority of searchers to your site. An extremely good acquisition rate for those searchers might be in the range of 20-40% (depending on industry), even if you have listings for all available real estate options in search results (an organic listing, a PPC ad, a Google Shopping Listing, etc.). So, a significant portion of your target audience still isn’t giving you a chance.

If your total keyword search volume for all of the pages of your site in a given month is, say, 100,000, then the best portion of searchers you could realistically hope to acquire might be 30,000 (honestly, even less because you’re not going to acquire 30% on all of your keywords). But even with our inflated example, you still didn’t get the click on 70,000 searches. So, if only half of them were unique searchers, you are left with 35,000 potential customers that never gave you the chance to convert them. What happens to all of those people? Some of them might convert on a competitor’s site on that very search. The majority of them will not. Most of them start considering the information they found or options they discovered.

Are they lost forever?

Now for the less obvious… You may think those searchers who didn’t reach your site are lost forever. You had your shot and you either weren’t ranked high enough or your listing(s) didn’t speak to them in a way that attracted the click. They went to other sites to find what they were looking for and that’s it. You lost your chance at the sale or the chance to build your relationship with them. You are acquiring clicks in accordance with where you are ranked and that’s it, you’re fine with it, you’ve accepted it and now you’re moving on to other keywords and marketing channels.

But wait, that’s simply not true. You don’t have to settle for that (nor should you). All of those searchers had their one shot to see how great you are and they missed out. They’re going to go with your competitor because they never really understood your uniqueness and the advantages that you offer them. After all, there were so many choices in the search results to pick from, they simply did not have time or energy to look at all of them, even if you were on the first page (or even #1).

How you can give them another chance…

What you might not know is that there’s a way you can give them another chance. It’s called search retargeting. What is it? Search retargeting is showing display ads to web users who searched using words that you had hoped would bring them to your site. Even though you built it, they didn’t come. However, with search retargeting, you actually can get a second chance at making a good first impression.

Be watching for more to come about this exciting web marketing channel…